Scientific Method —

New journal to target education in evolution

The first volume of a new journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach is online …

Evolutionary principles impact our understanding of everything from cancer, through drug and pesticide resistance, to managing the environment to maintain biodiversity. But the US public understands evolution poorly, and the mere presence of the topic in public science education has sparked controversy. A new journal, Evolution: Education and Outreach, has been established with the intention of improving education in the topic by getting scientists and teachers to discuss issues and lesson plans related to evolution. The journal has just released its first issue, and all the content has been made Open Access.

The brains behind Evolution: Education and Outreach are the Eldridge brothers. Two are high school students, and the third, Niles, happens to have been one of two people who produced the concept of punctuated equilibria; he's on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History.

The journal is meant to contain a mixture of lesson plans, scientific content, and personal reflections. It's an interesting concept, but some of the content seemed haphazard in this first issue. We don't normally expect articles in a scientific journal to form a coherent picture, but this one doesn't target the same audience. A better-implemented editorial vision might make future editions more than the sum of their individual parts.

Those individual parts seem hit or miss. I don't teach on the high school level, but the lesson plan on the kingdoms of life seems rather sparse and assumes a lot of preexisting knowledge in its target audience. Reports on the attempts to insert creationism in the science classrooms of England and the failure to call evolution by its name in the scientific literature have been covered well elsewhere. A personal perspective on the attitudes towards evolution of her peers could have used some further editing, but still painted an informative picture of how students come out of high school with a poor understanding of the topic, and typically avoid ever studying biology again.

Two articles, however, really stood out as excellent; both were on the philosophy of science. Ian Tattersall mixes personal experience in paleoanthropology with thoughts on Popper and Kuhn; I don't entirely agree with those thoughts, but they do a wonderful job of linking the abstract philosophy to the actual practice of science and thoughts of scientists.

But T. Ryan Gregory steals the show with an essay entitled "Evolution as Fact, Theory, and Path" (and I'm not just saying that because he's said nice things about me at his blog, Genomicron). Working from the definitions of the National Academies of Science, he shows how the common understanding of terms like "law" and "theory" cause confusion about the place of evolution in the sciences, and how the observable fact of evolution is just one small part of the theory.

Overall, there's some good material here, but some of it almost feels like it's written for nonoverlapping audiences. In the longer term, I think a more careful coordination of lesson plans with the material from scientists would make for a more compelling package. Hopefully, even in its current form, the material will be useful for educators.